Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers in Europe have developed an efficient way to deliver internet speeds at over 1 million gigabits per second through a single chip and laser system.

The experiment achieved a speed of 1.8 petabits per second, or nearly twice the amount of internet traffic the world transmits at the same rate. Amazingly, the feat was pulled off using only a single optical light source.

The research comes from a team at Technical University of Denmark and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Last week, the group published a peer-reviewed paper (Opens in a new window) in Nature Photonics about the technology.

The engineering of so-called Floquet states leads to almost-perfect atom-optics elements for matter-wave interferometers—which could boost these devices’ ability to probe new physics.

Since Michelson and Morley’s famous experiment to detect the “luminiferous aether,” optical interferometry has offered valuable tools for studying fundamental physics. Nowadays, cutting-edge applications of the technique include its use as a high-precision ruler for detecting gravitational waves (see Focus: The Moon as a Gravitational-Wave Detector) and as a platform for quantum computing (see Viewpoint: Quantum Leap for Quantum Primacy). But as methods for cooling and controlling atoms have advanced, a new kind of interferometer has become available, in which light waves are replaced by matter waves [1]. Such devices can measure inertial forces with a sensitivity even greater than that of optical interferometers [2] and could reveal new physics beyond the standard model.

The speed demonstrated by the researchers is equivalent to twice the traffic of the entire global Internet.

The first data transmission to exceed 1 petabit per second (Pbit/s) using only a single laser and a single optical chip has been demonstrated by European researchers.

Foresight Biotech & Health Extension Meeting sponsored by 100 Plus Capital.
Program & apply to join: https://foresight.org/biotech-health-extension-program/

This video was recorded at the Foresight Longevity Workshop.

Continue reading “Reason | An 80/20 Gene Therapy that Just Works — Challenge” »

Circa 2019 o.o!!!!

A light-based machine could hold the answers.

The drought affecting the Mississippi River has revealed a watery secret – a shipwreck that’s over a hundred years old. The skeleton of the craft emerged in Baton Rouge this summer, thanks to low water levels. Dr. Chip McGimsey, archaeologist for the State of Louisiana, believes the ruins belong to the Brookhill Ferry, which sank in 1915. He says the wreck provides a unique way to explore the past, noting, “It makes history alive in a way that you don’t get any other way.”

It can download 230 million photographs in one second.

We all want more internet power and now we may just get it. A single computer chip has transmitted a record 1.84 petabits of data per second via a fiber-optic cable.

230 million photographs downloaded in one second

Continue reading “New chip transmits a record breaking 1.84 petabits of data per second” »

It enables us to make extraordinary leaps of imagination.

We all have to make hard decisions from time to time. The hardest of my life was whether or not to change research fields after my Ph.D., from fundamental physics to climate physics. I had job offers that could have taken me in either direction — one to join Stephen Hawking’s Relativity and Gravitation Group at Cambridge University, another to join the Met Office as a scientific civil servant.

I wrote down the pros and cons of both options as one is supposed to do, but then couldn’t make up my mind at all. Like Buridan’s donkey, I was unable to move to either the bale of hay or the pail of water.

Continue reading “How our brain noises could make computers as imaginative as Shakespeare” »

JILA and NIST Fellow James K. Thompson’s team of researchers have for the first time successfully combined two of the “spookiest” features of quantum mechanics to make a better quantum sensor: entanglement between atoms and delocalization of atoms.

Einstein originally referred to entanglement as creating spooky action at a distance—the strange effect of quantum mechanics in which what happens to one atom somehow influences another atom somewhere else. Entanglement is at the heart of hoped-for quantum computers, quantum simulators and quantum sensors.

A second rather spooky aspect of quantum mechanics is delocalization, the fact that a single atom can be in more than one place at the same time. As described in their paper recently published in Nature, the Thompson group has combined the spookiness of both entanglement and delocalization to realize a matter-wave interferometer that can sense accelerations with a precision that surpasses the standard quantum limit (a limit on the accuracy of an experimental measurement at a quantum level) for the first time.